More About Helpers in ALS

Morgan Pacheco and Sam Orpita 

The ALS program has been around for a while. It’s a way for kids to learn the same way as everyone else in a way that works the best for them. Most people have no idea what goes on in there… Believe it or not it’s more like a normal class than you think. Kids do work and kids learn, they learn to cook and clean along with the stuff that goes on in any other class. These students also have helpers, students may think that they don’t do anything. They just stay with one person for a whole period and that’s it. But in fact there is more.

These helpers don’t just sit with any kid. They get assigned a kid they stay with for that period and they act like support like any of the other teachers do in the classroom. They talk to the kids, and they even help the kids… Not by giving them answers, but by guiding them to getting the right answer so they end up learning something and not just having an answer given to them. They walk with kids to their classes whether it’s pool class, or another class like human relations, they have helper with them to get them through the period as well as they can.

In other ways these helpers can be seen as friends, they spend periods with each other helping any way they can and eventually they get to know each other forming a friendship. They go from someone who just helps them whenever they need it to someone these kids realize they can count on, someone that these kids want around.

There are a lot of things that people don’t realize about this classroom, they think it’s not like other classrooms or that nobody gets anything done in there. They don’t realize there are students like everyone else trying to learn, it’s a classroom like all of the other rooms. Even though it may run a little different it’s all the same as every other classroom.

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